Chinese farmer hits paydirt with truffles

Published 1:00 am, Wednesday, February 22, 2006

TIGU, China - Yang Yongming once was a farmer like any other here, coaxing cabbage and potatoes from unforgiving red soil. Then he heard the strangest thing.

Foreigners, it seemed, had come asking for what peasants in this southwestern corner of China all but ignored: lumpy, manure-colored balls of fungus that sprout like weeds in the soft blanket of pine needles and speckled sunlight of this high plateau.

Eager visitors from Japan, Italy and the United States called them "truffles" and paid in fistfuls of cash.

A decade later, Yang is a truffle tycoon who sports pinstriped, European-cut business suits and operates in one of the world's most rarified corners of commerce.

He oversees an export empire that sends mounds of low-cost truffles to some of the finest restaurants in New York, Tokyo and Chicago - where diners rarely learn they aren't eating the prized European delicacy that wholesales for more than $700 a pound.

Just as China is revolutionizing global trade in textiles and television sets, it is an emerging titan in truffles.

Purists in the United States and Europe are aghast. They pooh-pooh the frail flavor and aroma of the cheaper Chinese variety and warn that consumers often are lulled or misled into paying European-grade prices - at least 30 times higher - for relatively pedestrian fungi.

France's 5,000 truffle growers also worry that the Chinese challenge could extend from economics to ecology, if Chinese spores find a home in European soil and crowd out less hardy native species.

The truffle controversy highlights how little of the world is insulated from the influence of a rising China, which is estimated to be the world's fourth-largest economy, after the United States, Japan and Germany.

The story of how a shrewd farmer with an elementary school education landed in the luxury trade in underground mushrooms is the story of a consummate Chinese entrepreneur who is harvesting the abundant resources of the East to satisfy the tastes and markets of the West.

"Truffles in Europe are very limited," Yang said. "If Chinese producers can continue to raise their quality, it is possible they can replace the European truffle as the world leader."

The truffle's peculiar aroma, rarity, ugliness and purported aphrodisiac qualities have inspired adherents ever since the Romans carted a pink species all the way from the region that is modern-day Libya.

Notoriously hard to cultivate, its taste and smell is variously compared to dirt, burned rubber, Gorgonzola cheese and iodine. Though the shape and hue invite scatological comparison, they are a chef's favorite for shavings or in sauces and oils.

Some of the priciest varieties are sold individually in cans no larger in diameter than a U.S. quarter.

But China has turned that world upside down. Since it began exporting its Tuber indicum truffle in the early 1990s, two dozen companies have cropped up to produce an annual harvest last year of 300 tons - more than twice that of France's prized Tuber melanosporum, known as Perigord truffles.

Yang, whose truffles are approved for import by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
, exports about 8 tons a year at $22 a pound to wholesalers. The price doubles by the time it reaches retail shelves but remains a small fraction of European prices.

Tan and compact, Yang, 42, is a farmer's son and former soldier who jokes about the gaps in his education, including the time, long ago, when someone pointed out that he was holding a newspaper upside down while pretending to read.

He never set out to build a business around luxury tastes, but like so much in China today, his life has been shaped by global markets.

"I wanted to give people in other countries only the best Chinese truffles and help our country earn some foreign currency," he said. "In the past, there was nowhere to send Chinese truffles, and it was a big waste. Now the truffle business benefits local farmers."

After founding his company,
Yunnan Qingzhen Processing Trade Co.
, in the mid-1990s, his early export attempts failed so badly that when he started to build an office in the shape of a mushroom, he ran out of capital before completing the cap.

Though the headquarters remains capless today, sales have soared, he says. He encourages clients to visit the spotless sprawling warehouse of stainless steel tables and equipment, where signs advise workers how to don white laboratory jumpsuits and face masks.

Though his boxes are emblazoned with "Product of China," unscrupulous dealers routinely attempt to pass off Chinese truffles as more expensive varieties, often with a dab of pungent oil or dark paint.

In France, mislabeling Chinese truffles as domestic is punishable by a fine and jail time, but no such law regulates U.S. menus.

"If you go to a bistro and the price they are charging for truffle shavings is too good to be true, that's probably because it is," said
Ariane Daguin
, co-founder and president of New Jersey-based
D'Artagnan Inc.
, one of the nation's top importers of truffles and other specialty foods.

Among chefs, the Chinese truffle has the reputation as an unspectacular but affordable workhorse, an alternative to Europe's so-called black diamonds.

"There is no way you can compare them to Spanish or French truffles because the flavor and aroma are different," said
Roland Liccioni
, executive chef at Le Francais in Wheeling, Ill.

"But they are so much less expensive than French truffles, and I can use them for some preparations like dressings. I can make a truffle vinaigrette . . . by pureeing the Chinese truffles and mixing them with a little port wine and Madeira, for instance."

The Chinese handle them differently. At this village on the outskirts of Kunming, truffle hunter
Zhang Zhigang
dumped a red plastic bag of fungus on the concrete floor as Yang, snapping his cell phone shut, knelt down to pick through the product.

With one hand, he puffed a cigarette through a water pipe jury-rigged from an old artillery shell. Then he picked up a knife and sliced a plump, golf ball-size specimen into chunks.

"It will take a long time for it to hit the Chinese market because only about 1 in 1,000 Chinese people have ever seen a truffle, much less know how to cook it," said Yang, whose personal specialty is thick, silver-dollar-size truffle slices sauteed with hunks of fatty pork.

In the car going back to the city, Yang pointed to empty fields and said he has heard the rocky soil and temperate climate of this high plateau would be perfect for a world-class vineyard.